Can a good designer design any type of game?
The question posed is a very open one and thus has many different ways of approach. Are we talking about one good designer in charge of the design aspect of a new genre he hasn’t worked on before? What criteria is the finished product being judged by, is a “good” designer making a “good game” enough, or are we talking blockbuster titles? Is the question focused on the swiftness of a designer to master a new genre, or are we talking about a designer’s ability to quickly jump between genres?
I would like to answer Yes to this question, but ultimately my instincts tell me No. The reason for this is that a good designer can probably make a good game, but I am not sure that is enough in today’s competitive market.
While I do believe the general skill set involved in making different types of games are transferable. I do not believe that the skills of making a successful FPS game can be directly transferred to making a successful realistic racing game. There are too many barriers to cross.
But then again, a good designer probably has enough experiences to quickly understand what is core in different titles; he is also a very quick learner and a good researcher. This gives him the tools needed to change genres if he wishes. But there is still a learning curve to each genre that everybody must go through, even the best designers.
Arcade
Arshak Ardeshir
Gustav Ziolkowski
Severin Brettmeister
Andre Beccu
The whole question depends on which definition of the word design that you expect the reader to rely on.
If you go by the one I believe is more common the problem is relevant, if you go by the one I and my colleagues use it is less of a problem. The more common one clumps “designer” together with “various artists who produce data” and the one I propose and use defines the designer as “caretaker of the production feedback loop”.
The latter is concerned with ensuring that the game production reliably optimizes its value by moving towards the vision within an environment where information is useful and available for effective decision making.
Very interesting definition Oskar. And I agree that design work is to often about making games in the dark. While you definition implies that the designer tries to lit the room with relevant feedback from the user before starting the next iteration.
That’s a decent summary, a good enough designer can also often spot ahead of time what things will fail before they are brought to the end user. The real trick is to really know when you are guessing and when you know what kind of result you already have developed.
The 2 real dangers of not testing against the end user are:
1: You might have a nugget of gold in the thing you think needs to be changed and you kill it by iterating without testing it.
2: You spend far too much time iterating on something which already is good enough and run out of money working on the wrong things.
The reason why I didn’t put the third “your product might suck” in there is because come launch day that will be tested anyway. The other two are the ones which determine if the product sucks or not at that point in time.